Account & Organization Navigation
Users wanted the ability to create and access multiple organizations in their account for resource isolation and workflow management. How might we allow users to easily create and switch between organizations? I led the design of new navigation for account, organization, and user settings.
I was the sole designer in charge of information architecture, wireframes, final mocks, and user testing.
I worked with two PMs and several front-end and back-end engineers to gather requirements and platform constraints.
Research & Discovery
Understanding Users' Needs
The Product Manager and I reviewed notes from customer calls and outlined four main reasons users wanted to have separate organizations in our platform.
Team Isolation
Multiple teams would like to access InfluxDB Cloud that is completely separate from other teams, either due to sensitive data or bill tracking.
Environment Isolation
Users would like to develop dashboards and tasks for InfluxDB Cloud without accidentally affecting their production workload.
OEM/Customer Isolation
When InfluxDB Cloud is embedded into a user's product, there is a desire to provide mediated or unmediated access to InfluxDB Cloud directly to the user's end customers.
Multi-Region Support
Since organizations are scoped to specific regions, users have expressed a desire to set up multiple accounts so they can write and access their data in multiple regions.
I developed user personas based on the notes from previous customer calls. There were four personas we wanted to consider while building out new features for multiple-organization navigation and support. These would also help in future projects, including role-based access.
I reviewed several tools to see how they separate out account, organization, and user profile navigation.
Next, I went through the process of listing out the information architecture and new features we wanted to incorporate at some point in the future.
I added the ability to switch organizations in the left-hand navigation, but there were three issues:
If the menu was collapsed, users wouldn’t be able to easily see which account and organization they were in at all times
Not including a similar way for users to switch accounts would create inconsistency between the two similar user actions
This design still doesn’t help inform the user about the hierarchy of an account vs. an organization
Placing the account, organization, and user drop downs at the top of the page enables the following:
Users can always see which account and organization they are in at all times, no matter what page they are on or if the main menu is collapsed
Reduces number of clicks for users to switch between accounts and organizations
Visually displays the hierarchy of accounts and organizations
Overall, the new navigation was received well when we tested it with a few customers. The main concerns were about role-based access, which was outside of the scope of this project.
Users need to be able to easily create and switch between organizations no matter where they're at in the app. Additionally, they'll need to be able to change settings, manage members, and delete organizations.
I worked closely with the UI engineer to implement the new navigation header and dropdowns.
Additional User Profile Page Settings
Since users will now be able to use multiple accounts and organizations, this created a new challenge - which account do they want to see by default when logging in and which organization would they want to show by default when switching accounts? I built a way for users to set this from their user profile page.
Create a New Organization
Users can quickly select to create a new organization from the dropdown, which opened up the Create Organization modal.
Upgrade to Add More Organizations
Free users needed to upgrade to add more than one organization and PAYG (Pay-as-you-go) users needed to upgrade to add more than three organizations. It was important to let users know once they had reached their quota.
Organization Settings
Although there weren’t any new features on the Organization Settings page, I simplified the design and cleaned up spacing.
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Organization Deletion
Now that it would be more common for users to delete an organization, it was important to warn users about the implications and how long they would have to recover the organization if they needed to.
Adding & Removing Members
I helped revamp the design of adding and deleting members from organizations. One improvement I made to the delete member user flow was having users choose another member to transfer tokens and alerts to so scripts would be uninterrupted.
Users can now easily access and switch between multiple organizations
This will drive further platform adoption by allowing users to separate out teams, environments, customers, and regions to best suit their company’s unique needs
Subscription upgrades will increase since the added benefit of adding more organizations provides flexibility when a user decides to upgrade
The new navigation will allow users to easily switch between their accounts and organizations, allowing quick access to create more queries for multiple organizations
Gain alignment from stakeholders during the requirements stage, especially if there are several decision makers
Meet more frequently to speed up the process, especially if multiple teams are involved
Grab 1-1 time with engineers to review their questions or feedback along the way, instead of waiting until a status update
